


Not Time's Fool

by jat_sapphire



Category: The Professionals
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-24 19:33:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16181735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jat_sapphire/pseuds/jat_sapphire
Summary: Bodie has an unusual experience of time, but he loves Doyle in all of it.





	Not Time's Fool

**Author's Note:**

> Usually I am a big tagger, but almost any tag I use is self-contradictory in this story. The central plot point and the SF part of the story come from another story, but it is well-known enough that to tell what it is will spoil this one. (See the end note when you want to know.) Several episodes of _The Professionals_ are extensively used, both dialog and incidents, but this story cannot be called canon-compliant.
> 
> All the sex is consensual.

> Let me not to the marriage of true minds  
>  Admit impediments …  
>  Love's not time's fool ….  
>  (Sonnet 116)

 

I woke and knew immediately that I had slipped. It always happens while I'm asleep.  I was in a warm, clean bed, and another person was next to me, so I lay as still as I could, eyes closed, listening.  The traffic was remote and slow.  A city, then, but the building couldn't be on a major street.  The air was a little chill, a little smoggy.  Probably London.  Lots of London years.  No cigarette smoke.  Apparently, supper had been Indian takeaway, but that didn't tell me much. 

While there was nothing odd about waking with a bedmate, which one would make a big difference to the rest of the morning. I took a slow, deep breath, to see what perfume was there, what shampoo, a woman's or a man's sex smells, perhaps scented lotion or Vaseline.  No perfume, no kind of lubricant.  A little sweat, but not sour.  Alcohol, as if both of us were breathing it out.  Hair, a sweet damp smell that I thought I knew and that made my pulse beat heavily and my breath deeper and faster.

As slowly as I could, I turned away from the golden-brown wall, onto my back, onto the other side, saw him, and couldn't suppress the gasp or the tears that stung my eyes. It was Ray.  I wanted to shout, to reach out and pull him against me.  Kiss him senseless.  Fuck him through the mattress.  Hold his face and laugh, tell him how very much he was loved, how essential he was.  Ray!  Real and breathing and ... younger than I had ever seen him.

When _was_ this?

I needed to know, yet I stole a few more moments just to gaze. It was so good to see the chestnut curls every which way on the pillow, even though they were fairly short.  No grey, or hardly any.  Ray looked pale, clammy, and his mouth was slightly open.  He was drooling a little, his eyebrows raised as if his own dream were surprising him.  Silly pillock.  I almost laughed, but managed to control it―a gulp and some shaking was all, and Ray never stirred.  I made a fist from the hand lying on my own hip, held it down hard so I wouldn't ruffle his hair or stroke his cheek.  So I could watch some more.

The slip before this must be thirty years later, more. The last day of it, I'd gone to the churchyard to pull weeds and trace the dull letters of his name.  That was all he had on the stone, not even dates. 

I’m fortunate to be a natural detective. Every slip, I have to find myself, locate myself in years and jobs and relationships, and often, just as I settle into the undercover role that is my life, I slip again.  I know the ends of stories that I’ve never seen begin, middles without either beginning or end.  I’ve seen friends turned into strangers and lovers turned enemies.  Young faces I never saw old, and old ones I can't imagine young.  I can never believe such a mad mess of experience was arranged by any God, or even Fate, and how could I rely on any person?  Only myself.

And Ray, though it made no sense. He knew nothing about the slips, less than I myself about my past.  When I'd tried to reckon how much of my time with him I'd lived, I'd tallied five and a half years, not enough, yet draining a bank I knew was limited.

We'd both still been working for CI5 when he died, and I haven't yet lived through the event or the days just after, when I could have found out what had happened without sounding as if I were barking mad. No obituary—Cowley didn't allow even that much to get out for most of us.   Knowing the time of Ray's death was still waiting for me made me dread every slip since I'd first lived in a time he was my lover.

His mouth smacked a little. He drew a deeper breath, frowned in his sleep, and I saw his eyes moving beneath the lids.  His legs shifted a little, restlessly.  Not touching him was so hard that I grabbed at the bedclothes. 

With a little start, he opened his eyes. They were bleary.

I held my breath, kept my face still.

“What the 'ell you lookin' at, then? Grown two noses, 'ave I?”

“Just lost your aitches.” I let myself smile.

He hauled himself up on one elbow, squinted, and said, “You mean to say you an't even hung over? You jammy bastard!  How'd you do it?”

I shrugged as much as I could, which wasn't much in that position. “Natural superiority, my son.”

Now he sat all the way up, so I did too. He was bare to the waist, and so was I.  Under the covers, I could tell I had my y-fronts on.  If I'd noticed that earlier, I'd have saved myself some suspense:  once we were sharing beds to have sex, we slept naked. 

He rubbed his face and his scalp, scratched his chest, and squinted at me again. “Well, I've been worse,” he conceded.  “Can't've been really legless.  What were we drinking, anyway?”

“Don't remember.” Luckily, anyone might say that the next morning.  “Must've been bad enough I couldn't drive, right?”

He shrugged. Smacking his lips again, he complained, “Mouth tastes like me trainers after jumping in the Thames.” 

“Licked them, did you?”

“Shut it.” He clambered, a bit unsteadily, out of bed, and I watched the lithe muscle of him, in pale blue pyjama bottoms, vanish into the bog and make hungover noises.

I went into the kitchen, and found eggs and sausage in the fridge, so I cooked up the sausages, then three eggs for me and two for Ray. He eyed them disapprovingly, but ate.  He even had a sausage.

The good thing about starting a slip at his place was that he drove me to mine. Sometimes I woke up with a bird, and then it could be challenging getting home, or even knowing where home was.  I’d just slept in more than once, hoping Ray would come and collect me.  He seemed not to mind, oddly enough.

He’d mentioned at breakfast that he meant to spend the day tuning his motorbike and working on his newly-purchased old bike parts, getting the dents out and polishing them up. I knew I’d more often taken the piss about broken down pushbikes than shown any interest in his hobby, so if I wanted time with him today (and I did), I’d need to think something up.

If we weren’t fucking each other, then we were both pulling as many birds as we could catch. I looked round my flat and found my little black book.  Surely there was a double-date in here somewhere.  After reading my notes and making some phone calls, I found one.  Debbie and Frances knew each other, and Fran especially was the kind of bird who was up for new experiences.

Then I needed to check around, see what state my caches were in, what resources I had. That took a few hours.  Afterwards I showered and dressed as I usually did in those early CI5 years, in a suit.  The grey one, with the silver-grey tie and the shirt with just a little silver metallic thread in it:  I knew it looked good on me, and just because Ray wasn’t in love with me yet didn’t mean I should deprive him of a visual treat.  “Morning,” I said brightly at the door of the garage, though it was gone 4:30 at least.

“Hallo.” He was bent over the bike carcass, tightening something with a long screwdriver, wearing a red overall, hardly stylish but a good colour on him. 

I had one hand in my trouser pocket and, striding forward, pocketed the other as well. “Listen, you've got this terrible decision to make.”  That was the trick:  be enthusiastic, but casual, beautiful and a real chum ( _the only one you need, Ray_ ).

I had his attention, anyway. “How?”

“Either this terrific girl I've lined up for you, or this old bike.” I talked Frances up  as if she were Aphrodite risen from the Channel.  My words drew him away from the battered bits and out to the bike that would at least run.  “Hair like silk, beautiful eyes, her mouth—did I say mouth? No, a poem—”

He was caught. “What time?”

“About thirty minutes.”

“You’re on.”

I clapped my hands and pushed the back of the bike while he wheeled the front into the garage. I was still talking up the date when we first laid eyes on another girl—looked like she was waiting for a taxi, except taxis didn’t cruise there, and anyway she was staring at Ray.  “Anyone we know?” I asked him.

My randy old toad said right away, “No, but I wouldn’t mind.”

Later he minded. At the restaurant, he chatted with Frances, looking edible himself in his black pin-stripe jacket and white dress shirt cracked open like an oyster shell to frame his jaw and show his strong neck.  I had to work on paying attention to Debbie, and still I ended up twitting Ray about the bill until Fran told us to stop arguing.

Jill Haydon appeared over his shoulder like a vengeful ghost. Of course, I didn’t know, then, who she was or what she was after.  I was even annoyed when Ray wouldn’t say something conciliatory to her, so we could just move on with the evening.  How long had it been since I’d seen Ray dance?  Too long.  When he grabbed at the disco plan to get rid of Jill, I just followed.

But it was all spoiled. Ray dances like sex on legs when he has a mind to, and Frances is good too, but tonight he kept that cross expression that twists his face out of any beauty, and he hardly spoke to Fran or seemed to listen to the music.  He can’t really be awkward—I’ve never seen it, even when he was using crutches—but he didn’t have that sinuous movement that draws my eye … hell, every eye on the dance floor.  He touched Frances absently and wouldn’t even look at me.

Fran was miffed, and Debbie on her behalf. No legs were going to get over tonight, that was sadly obvious.

Back at Ray’s, just the two of us, he leaned in the lounge doorway and said, “She ruined the whole evening.”

She hadn’t even been in the disco. I didn’t see how Ray’s temper could be her fault.  “ _She_ did?”  At least I could have a drink—I fetched some of Ray’s good scotch, the bottle and a glass for each of us.  “She just wanted to talk to you, that's all.  What did her father do to you, anyway, for God's sake?”

“Oh, not to me.” He was rapidly escalating from moodiness to anger.  “Not me, mate.”

I poured for him. “Look, I don't know what this is about, but to hold a grudge—”  I was baffled.  Ray was ratty, but I didn’t remember him hanging on to rage.  A flash in the pan, Ray’s temper, a flame that was intense but brief.  Not seven years long.

Now it was turning to me, and not just rattiness: his mouth was pulled in on itself with old pain I longed to smooth away. 

“He killed my partner,” Ray said, and my breath caught. His eyes still burned into mine.  “Syd Parker.”  Looking away, back into the past, he went on, “He was a good copper and a good friend.”  Now he stared into his glass and I stood remembering my years alone, the grinding pain of being without _my_ partner.  No touch of Ray’s hand, no sound of his voice, the world grey and empty.

“And Bill Haydon stuck a bullet right through the middle of him,” and his voice went up, his eyes blazed hotter: “Now, tell me, Bodie, how’d _you_ feel about that?!”

Like dying. Like killing.  Not even being able to know where vengeance could turn, what grudge to hold.  I couldn’t say anything.  My face felt turned into stone.  “I dunno.”  I had to step away.

A breath or two of silence, then Ray said in a low voice, “Sorry, mate.”

“That’s okay.” Behind him now, I watched as he took the jacket off, the muscles of his shoulders and back still tense.  Because I couldn’t go to him, I slid my hand through the gap in the curtains and looked out.  And there she was, standing like a little Christmas-tree fairy in that bell-shaped rough-wool coat of hers.  “She’s back.”

He went to her. I wondered afterwards what would have happened if I’d left the bloody curtain alone.  Maybe she would have rung the bell, and it would have been the same in the end.  Maybe if I hadn’t put my oar in, claiming that to get peace from her, he’d have to visit Haydon in prison, he wouldn’t have gone … but Jill was determined to pull Ray into it by hook, crook, or the offer of her own fair body.

After that, there was no getting him away from the case, not for a date, not for fishing, not for the prettiest brace of barmaids I’d seen in the last several slips. (I remembered them well from three years later, and knew they were susceptible to the Bodie charm.)  I didn’t care one way or the other—either Ray’d been right arresting Haydon, or we’d find out who had really killed his partner and make sure that their lives were not worth living—but he cared.  About Jill, too, though he didn’t fall in love, luckily.  Nasty little bint—flew at Cowley with her nails out.  Her father’s daughter, as I pointed out to Ray in the car.

But even after he went to Wandsworth to let Haydon know that he needn’t bother to plan hols in Tenerife, it was scarcely lunchtime, so we stopped at Ray’s to throw his things together and went fishing after all. The pub with the girls was near the New Forest, in Brockenhurst, and we stayed at an inn on the main tourist drag.  The room was on the ground floor, twin beds, so not a great place to pull to, but the girls both lived in town, so we had some choices.  We checked in, then went off to a spot or two I know where we could fish to our heart's content, or till dusk, anyway.  Ray casting his fishing line, bringing it back, then casting out again, shoulders and hips and arms working, was _my_ visual treat.  We didn't catch much, at that time of day, but neither of us minded.  We had good pub food waiting for us.

We ate, then took the birds back to the inn, where they also worked when not barmaiding. This time Doyle had the blond bird, Jenny, and mine was a redhead called Brandy. Well, really more auburn, just the colour of the liquor.  When they both went off to the loo together, I couldn't help telling him, "Y'know her favourite pop song, don't you."

"Well, she's a fine girl." He gave me a sideways look with a glint and a grin. "What a good wife she would be."

I half-sang it: "But my life, my love, and my lady is the Cee—” and he tried to shush me, but he was smiling, and I wanted to laugh aloud with happiness, but had to finish, "I ... 5."

He rolled his eyes. "Berk."

And then the girls were back, so I had to choke back my laughter and my disappointment.

Brandy was a snug little armful, and I put my mouth to all the better things it could do in public, but soon enough she was squirming and I was half-hard. Allowing myself a glance at Ray, I saw he was already negotiating.  “What's your pleasure, love?” I murmured in Brandy's shell-like.  “You know what room we're in.  Not much mattress even if we shove the singles together.”

“Me 'n Jenny were talking about that. Reckon we could use one of the king bedrooms.  It's empty.”

“And what about Jenny and Doyle?”

She looked at the base of my throat and played with my shirt collar, tugging on the wings, arranging them over my collar bone and jumper. “Well, I meant all four of us.”  Cute as she was, pretending to be shy, I couldn't say yes before finding out what Ray thought about it.  I looked over and found him looking at me while he caressed Jenny's back through her blouse.

“Up for it, mate?” I asked.

“Oh, I'll be up.” With that glint in his eye, I'd follow him anywhere.  My only question, which I naturally kept to myself, was how much of a foursome it would be: two couples, or all four.

I was in luck. The girls undressed each other and both of us.  I looked at Ray when I thought I was unobserved;  he looked at me with what seemed like interest.  The girls fondled both of us and each other, and then Jenny went down on Ray and Brandy on me, and everywhere I looked was something that made me harder and more eager.  Brandy had dark red body hair and lovely sloping hips.  Jenny's breasts were larger and moved freely as she leaned forward and pulled back.  Ray, of course, was beautiful, his skin burnished with sweat when he fucked Jenny from below and his face glorious when he came, while I was on my knees doing Brandy doggy-style and tickling her clitoris, and Jenny climbed off Ray and kissed Brandy, then slid under her to suck her breasts.  Ray twisted around and put his face in Jenny's box, and that brought her off nicely, but also put him in my reach, so I buried my hand in his mop of curls and then felt the muscles move in his shoulder.  Jenny shook and squirmed, making noises that must have felt good to Brandy, who pressed her torso down and gripped me rhythmically from within.  Ray sat up and stroked my back, and that was it for me.  My head went back and my balls tightened, spilling into Brandy what I would rather have given Ray.

Still, he was _there_.

We collapsed in a pile, cuddling until I wasn't sure whose hand was resting in the hair just above my prick, whose head was on my shoulder, whose spine curved against my side. Sleepily, I felt my heart thunder and the pulse bang in my throat, slowing only gradually as I wondered at my incredible luck to so nearly have Ray so early in our partnership.  He'd never mentioned it to me later.  That ought to be worrying—perhaps he hadn't liked it—but I couldn't bring myself to bother.

After a brief kip, the girls kissed us and shooed us back to our own room, as they needed to clean up and get to their flats before their room-mates started calling round town to try to find them. Ray and I just pulled our trousers on and ducked through the hall.  Our twin bed room wasn't far away and the inn seemed deserted.

Dumping our clothes on top of the dresser for sorting the next day, we slid under the covers of our narrow beds and shut off the lamp. “Wednesday tomorrow,” and Ray's voice sounded as if he was barely awake.  “When do we see Cowley?”

“One. Plenty of time to have a lie-in and a meal.”

“All ...” he yawned, “right.”

I heard the fondness in my own voice but couldn't help it. “G'night, Ray.”

He mumbled something.

The next I knew was daylight outside my eyelids; opening them, I saw that I was still in Brockenhurst, and we'd left the curtains open on one of the windows.  A bright stripe split the room.  It was going to be hard to leave on such a perfect day for the New Forest, but there was no choice.  Turning away from the sun, I looked across at Ray's bed.  He was awake, gazing at me.  As intent as that stare was, I couldn't read his expression, but then he smiled—one of the broad, beautiful ones that I'm sure has pulled on my heartstrings long before we ever admitted friendship, much less stronger feelings.

I cleared my throat, hoping that the voice that would come out when I spoke might be a mate's, even a partner's, but not a lover's. “Sleep well?”  Still too tender. 

“Yes,” he said, the smile gone.

The uncurtained window was nearest me, so I wrapped the sheet round my waist and went to pull the cloth across, dimming the room and protecting our modesty from the people walking on the pavement the other side of the strip of garden and the outdoor seating for the restaurant. We both washed up in the ensuite, dressed, and went to breakfast.  They had a lovely full English.

Back in London, Cowley had nothing significant for us to do: some nosing about for an op Lewis and Anson were working on and checking some of the new boys on obbos.  Not so different from fishing together—joking and chatting in the car, for the most part.  Then reports and a pub meal with a couple of pints.  I could see that Ray found it boring.  If I lived forward, I would too, I suppose.  As it was, I hoped for a longer stay.  I could have enjoyed months of dull obbos and pub darts, perhaps a double-date or so:  sitting in the Capri, killing off vaudeville, hearing Ray's voice and his laugh or just his breath.

But the next morning I woke in a bedroom I’d never seen before. The silver Capri waited for me in the street, and Cowley waited in his office with a briefing for Doyle and me to interfere with a hired assassin. 

Ray’s hair was longer and had smaller curls than during the stay in Brockenhurst—fluffy, really, was the only word for it—as he'd worn it for some of the time we were lovers, but I was wary of treating his hair like a calendar, like solid evidence. He was wearing a cloth jacket that lay close to his neck, matching trousers, and he stood straighter than usual.  His eyes just flicked to me and then back to Cowley, as if Ray were under cover already.

The assassin was easy enough to bring in, since we knew what flight he was taking. We walked him out, and once we got him to HQ and the interrogation rooms, I would have been glad to beat the shit out of him.  Nasty, whinging, pinched voice, and nasty job to take out an ordinary, suburban fellow with wifey and maybe kiddies.  I supposed he only annoyed me until I realized that Murphy looked most like him but could never pull off the role, and I couldn’t either, but Ray could do the accent.  And there he went, picking up Van Neikirk’s bags and checking into his hotel room.  Then I hated the bastard, for putting Ray in danger and for his wicked smart mouth.  It’s the only time I was just as glad to be stuck at an obbo, taking pictures of everyone who came to dull Mr Suburb’s door.  Well, for several minutes, anyway.

Then of course I had to get ambitious (Ray would say arrogant) and break into the house while Mrs Suburb went out to get her laundry. How was I to know she’d forgotten her ticket?  Back she came while I was paddling through her husband’s albums of newspaper clippings.  I told her an outrageous story about my failed copy shop and all, rueful and charming as I could be, and she tore a strip off me but let me go.

Ray came to see me. Not really safe, I would have said, but I was too glad to see him to give him the stick he deserved.  Irresistable, me!  He even brought me some whiskey.  He was oddly nervous, it seemed, moving in to use the binoculars, then back a step to show me a bird distributing flyers.  Of course I said, “Whatever she’s selling, we need it,” but all the while he was so close that I felt the heat of his body down my back and side.  He looked through the binoculars again, as soon as I went back to sit down and swig my whiskey, then asked after Cowley.  Well, he wasn’t there, was he?  Fine place for the head of CI5, a shabby room with ugly wallpaper down one side and a plastic box of grey sarnies.  Hardly a place to take a report, which it seemed Ray didn’t have anyway. 

“I’d better go,” he said. 

To prolong the time, I told him about the one piece of information I’d found in the newspaper clippings, and how I’d broken in and been caught. The expression on his face as he laughed at me was almost enough to break my control.  If ever a man wanted kissing, Ray did just then.  His eyes were all alight and he was smiling.  I grabbed the back of my own neck and held myself still.

When he’d really left, I went back to my binoculars humming the tune he’d whistled. It was always hard not to be on edge when he was undercover, but fortunately, I thought, Van Neikirk was under lock and key.

Except he wasn’t. When Cowley and I went down to the interrogation cells to try again, the only person in the cell was the hapless boy Cowley’d assigned to bring down Van Neikirk’s dinner.  Dead.  Dark curly hair under the blanket the killer’d dumped over him, not really like Ray’s but enough to ignite my fear like petrol poured on a fire, and that kind of shock always makes me angry.  I hardly knew what was coming out of my mouth or registered that it was Cowley I was shouting at.  “Another foul up, another piece of incompetence!” I said, thinking of Ray strolling into the obbo where Van Neikirk could have seen him, remembering myself slipping across the street and breaking the back window.

“When was the last?” Cowley asked.

I couldn’t drop myself in it, and certainly not Ray. “Well, who remembers, it's all the same, isn't it?”  Oh, god, Ray in the hotel, so vulnerable, and this wild animal gone after him—Van Neikirk of course knew which hotel he’d been given a room in, at least, and he could be there right now— _right now._ And here was Cowley nattering about whether I’d ever fouled up—oh yes, I absolutely had!  Was this it, was this Ray’s death?  I’d been faffing about looking through binoculars and driving in the wrong direction, away from the hotel, strolling after Cowley to the cell, all that nonsense when Ray might be lying with his throat cut or his neck broken.  Had I missed a last kiss, holding him once more, because I hadn’t been sure where we stood with each other and decided to hold back?  If we were lovers, had we fought, perhaps, the day before my slip, and that was why he was so remote at the briefing and then so uncertain at the obbo?

Ray didn’t answer his room phone or the RT. I ran upstairs from the cells, ran to the car park, and jumped in the Capri as if speeding would save him.  I didn’t care where I left the car, didn’t care that I had drawn my gun when the hotel char could’ve seen it.  The rooms were empty.  That couldn’t be good news.  My heart hammered as I went into the bathroom, saw the towel covering another curly-haired corpse— _Ray_ —but it wasn’t in the end.  I dropped the towel back over the girl’s head and sat on the edge of the tub, gulping and waiting for my hands to stop shaking.

Of course, the fact that Van Neikirk had not killed Ray in the hotel room did not mean that he was safe. My mind raced, making foolish lists of where he might be.

The RT beeped. “3-7,” I said.

“3-7,” Cowley said, “4-5 just contacted Base. He's at a phone box east of Ide Hill.  Go and pick him up.”

“At Ide Hill?”

“That's what I said. On your bike, boy.”  So he was still angry about my outburst.

I drove more sedately away from the hotel, city to suburbs to villages, up the slope to Ide Hill, through its tiny, boring High Street, out to countryside where I needed to pay attention and look for phone boxes. I came to one by the side of the road, parked and didn't see Ray, and started to panic again, but there was no sign of struggle or violence, so I got back in the Capri and drove farther.  Lorries roared past.  Then I saw a touch of red, another phone box, and beside it a lump ... a figure seated on the ground, head down ... curly-top ... yes, Ray.  He looked perfectly all right.

I leaned out the window and spoke lightly. “Do you want a lift?”

He grinned, got to his feet, approached the car.

“How the hell did you get out here?” I asked.

“It's a long story.” He stopped at the driver's side window, rubbed his rear.

I wanted to hear it; I wanted to rub that lovely arse myself.  Instead I joked, “Aw, you banged your head.”

He grimaced. “I'll bang yours in a minute.”

“Now, don't be like that,” I said, reaching out but allowing only the backs of my fingers to touch him. I meant _be exactly like this, be yourself, unhurt but for a few bruises, be here and alive with me._ He got in the passenger seat and slid down as I turned the car;  he propped one foot on the dash and rested an arm on the raised knee, looking out the windscreen.  I handed him those aviator sunglasses he favours, which had been on the hotel table with the jigsaw puzzle.

“Ta,” and he put them on. Of course, that meant I couldn't see his eyes.

“So what's the long story?”

He waved the hand that was hanging in mid-air, said nothing.  

I let him get away with it for a while, until we were out of Ide Hill, when the buildings were gone but freight lorries and holiday-making cars were around us once more. “You were jumped,” I said, certain.  It was that kind of silence, the kind that meant he was disappointed in himself.  Also, normally he would have been complaining that I hadn't arrived soon enough, so he knew I was feeling bad that I hadn't been there all along.

“Yeah. In the car park.  Was Van Neikirk, I think.”  A longer pause until he said, “Just luck I wasn't left in the boot of some tourist's hire car and left there a week while they saw the museums and the Tower.”

“Whose was it, then?”

He shrugged. “Joyriders, got 'emselves in an accident.   Boot lid popped—I rolled out.  Car burned out 'n me just standing there gobsmacked.  Not even an RT to call in on.”

“Least you weren't in it.” I reached out without looking, couldn't help it, and ended up with a wrist, just inside the sleeve of his jacket.  I held it firmly for too long, but he wasn't making me drop it, and my fingers wouldn't loosen.  “Not your fault, Ray.”  The tip of my middle finger lay over his pulse, and I felt it, even and strong.

“'Course not.” His voice was still subdued.

“Then don't get in a gloom, mate.” The car was quiet, maybe too quiet, but neither of us put on the radio.  I heard a deeper breath mix with the cars' up-and-down buzz past us, the blowing air against the windscreen and along the sides of the Capri.  Music enough.

He sat up and took off the shades, so I let go his wrist at last. “Need me gun,” he complained before even beginning to look for it, and I laughed a bit, biting my tongue where he could see it.  He felt under the dashboard, but it wasn't there, then looked out the passenger side window, his hand coming up near his mouth, before he turned back and asked, “All right, where've you hidden it this week?”

I pointed down. “Taped under the seat.”  The RT beeped as he reached for it, and when I put on the posh voice to say, “Get that for me, will you,” he gave me a look, but did, holding it high in my peripheral vision.  I said, “Thenk-yeu,” smirked, and grabbed it.  “3.7.”

“Message for you,” said a man's voice. I wasn't sure who it was;  covering the phone shifted through the whole B squad.  While Ray was loading his gun beside me, this fellow said to get to the newspaper premises “as fast as possible.”  The shot of adrenaline this time was pure pleasure. 

I was almost giddy. “Fast as possible,” I told Ray, and gunned the accelerator, grinning like a loon.

We had a couple of near misses—those lorries don't manoeuvre well—but got into town in good time and were on the stairs at the right moment to let Mr Suburb Hope flee past and to take on Van Neikirk. I think it must have been the shape of Ray's fluffy hair that he recognized and that made him fire, a stupid move in that kind of space, all ricochets and no good light.  Still, he ran while we were regrouping and we ended up chasing him through the print room, where I managed to get the drop on him.  Just a moment of feeling how he'd killed that kid at HQ and that girl, whoever she was, in Ray's hotel room—and too nearly Ray—and I shouted “Freeze!” and took him out as he turned toward me.

Ray caught up with the ambulance men and the corpse as we reached the newspaper lobby entrance, and he strode along looking too solemn. I didn't want more gloom, and if anyone deserved shooting dead, it was that assassin animal, so I pulled out the other thing I'd taken from the hotel room, the athletic headband that had been lying on the floor.  I thought it was Van Neikirk's, so I pulled it on my own head, as a kind of trophy.  “How does that grab you?” I asked Ray.

When he glanced over, his face twisted with disgust, and though he turned toward me, his face swung away. “Take it off.”

“Hey?” It wasn't especially funny, I knew, but I hadn't thought he'd be angry.

“I said, take it off!” He was serious, so I did.

“All right!” It was in my hand;  he took it.  He seemed upset or sick, so I said, “Got banged on the head, mate,” in case it was that.

His face was remote as he stared at the knit band hanging from his fingers.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

Looking at me as if seeing me for the first time since the car, he twirled the headband a couple of times and said, “Let's go.”

He led the way back to the Capri and got into the driver's seat. I handed him the keys and watched his set profile as he drove to my flat.  My emotions were in a tangle, and I needed what I was not sure he'd give me.  These short slips were killing me, not knowing was choking me, and when he parked at my door I blurted, “I want you.  Ray.  I ... I want us to fuck.  Tonight.”

Thus the great seducer of CI5. I would have laughed at myself, but I was too strung up for it.  

“ _Finally,_ ” he said.  His face was hard, but he reached over and it was his turn to hold my wrist, through the jacket this time, squeezing so hard I wasn't sure the blood could circulate.  “God, Bodie, finally.”

Still not sure exactly what that meant, I found that in this moment, I didn't care. Since he'd said yes.

He got out, waiting for me as I went around the car, and _yes_ was in his stance and _yes_ in his kiss when I reached him.  On the street!  In the shadow between streetlamps, but right in the open, not that late at night, giving me his urgency and taking my _yes, yes, yes_ in return.  The kiss ended, but we were still holding each other.  “'F the bobby on the beat sees us, we're for it,” he murmured into my ear.

“Then let's get inside, where we can hide the evidence,” I said, pushing my stiff cock into his, which was bulging against the flies of his trousers.

We pushed apart and ran, not top speed, but enough to clatter in the stairwell and lean laughing on either side of the door when we got up to it. My hands were unsteady when I turned the key.  His looked a little shaky as he did the locks.  I grabbed him by the elbow and tugged him into the bedroom, and I wondered again whether this was our first time, but he showed no hesitation as he stripped, watched me strip, and as we toppled onto the mattress to touch each other everywhere.

For me it was coming home at last after such a long absence. One night would have been too long, and I'd lived many nights, many weeks, through many slips since I had last tasted this skin, buried my nose in his hair and the crannies of his body, taken his cock in my mouth, felt his bum in my hands.  I knew how he liked me to press my tongue under the head of his cock and make small circles there.  I knew how he loved when I blew through his pubic hair, how he went crazy when I rimmed him, how he preferred to be fucked lying on his side and liked to fuck me while I lay on my back.  We did all that, holding each other close in between, and he was as wild and hungry as I was, as if he too had been kept away.  After I'd fucked him, lingering as long as I could in that heavenly tight arse, I stroked his chest and belly, kissing his ear, behind it, and into his hair.  I found the lump where Van Neikirk had struck him, mouthed it extra-gently, and murmured, “You sure this is all right?”

“Fine time to ask,” he said lazily. “I almost passed out when I came in your arse. What would you have done?”

“Had a very embarrassing conversation at the A&E,” I said.

He shook with silent laughter. “And with Cowley.”

“And with Kate Ross.”

“Yeah.” Though he lay still, I felt tension gather slowly in his muscles.  “Bodie?” he asked, more tentatively than anything else he’d said that day.

I held him tighter. “Yes?”

“I can stay here tonight, that's all right? Sleep here?” His effort to sound nonchalant wasn't working at all.

I turned him on his back and hung over him, to kiss the uncertain line out of his lips, to smooth the tension at the ends of his eyes with my lips and thumbs, and to meet his gaze as I said, “Please, Ray, please stay the night.” He smiled and my heart turned over.

I'm impulsive, I know. I put my head down on on him, so my cheek was in his chest hair and some of my weight lay against him, and he stroked my hair, but I couldn't just be silent.  “I love you, Ray,” I said.

His fingers tightened, even pulled a little. “Oh, Bodie,” he said, his voice low and tender.  “You're such a softie, sweet and soft like marshmallow inside.”  He lifted his hand and let strands fall through his fingers, then stroked again.  “I have such a sweet tooth for you, I think I'll never stop.”

“Don't,” I answered, maybe too forcefully. Ray's hand paused.

“You may find me ... different sometimes.” He swallowed.  “I don't want it to hurt you.”

“Different how?”

“You won't believe me.” His voice was so sad that I lifted myself again to look into his eyes, and they seemed to have tears in them.  I stroked his cheek.  He said, “I might.  I could.  Sometimes.  Seem to forget this.”

“Why, what's the matter?” Now I was frightened.  “Is it the concussion, are you feeling worse?  Do we need to go—”

His fingers covered my mouth, and he said, “No, no, Bodie, calm down. It's just, I don't know how to explain.”  I waited while he looked at the ceiling, over my shoulder out the window, below my chin where his fingers were stroking my throat and collar bone, tickling in the centre indentation.  He took a deep breath and said, “Most people live one day to the next, and the next after that.  In a row, straight ahead.”

“Ray!” I cried. “You slip forward and back!  You live some of the past, then some of the future, and then past again.  Like me.  Like me!” 

His mouth dropped open, almost half an inch. I'd never seen that literally happen.  I laughed aloud with joy and grabbed him hard.  “You're knocked for six,” I said, kissed him, then admitted, “So am I.” 

“I've always been alone with this,” he said, wondering. “Now we're, we're really together.”

“Yes,” I said.

He put his hands on my face, framing it, and looked his fill, with so much love that it was like a stove radiating heat against my skin. A chill fell, though, and I kissed his eyes, afraid I knew what it was.  I was right.  “I've never seen you old,” he said, “and never lived without you since we were teamed.  How far ahead have you been?”

“I've died.” That was an easy answer.  “I was ... will be ... unconscious, I think.  It was just a sharp pain in my head and my lungs seizing up.  It didn't take long, and then I was being born—squeezed all over.  I knew why we all cry!  That was unpleasant.”

“Yes, it was.” He smiled a little, then sobered again.  “How old were you?”

“When I was born?” I hedged.

“Prat! When you died.”

I shrugged. “I don't know.  Old, I think.”

“After I died, then.” So I didn't have to tell him, but just thinking about it made me put my face on his chest again.

“Too long,” I said into his skin, over his beating heart.

“I was lying on the floor of my flat,” he said. “A strange position, chest down and one arm flung around to my back, legs bent.  Mouth open, cheek on the rug.  The rug was shag, white shag, it was in my mouth and nose.  I'd been unconscious—it was like waking up into a nightmare.  Hurt so bad.  Couldn't breathe properly.  Blood in my throat.  I think I was shot.”

“Where was I?” It was louder than I meant.  I raised my head.  “Where the hell was I?”

He petted my temples and down my cheeks. “I dunno.  But hush, Bodie.  I do know it wasn't your fault.”  I shook my head, and he pulled me to him and kissed me long and sweet.  “Never you.”  I put my face in his neck. 

We lay still and quiet. His breath started to sound laboured to me, and I rolled to one side, taking him with me so our skins were still snugly pressed together.  I thought about his death.  “I can't bear it, sunshine,” I said.

“Maybe we don't have to.” His voice held the wonder it had when we realised we both lived zig-zag.  “Bodie, next time you ... jump, tell me.  I'll tell you.  Just like this.”

“Naked in bed?”

“If we wake up that way, you prat.” The insult sounded like an endearment.  I realized it always had, or almost always.  “I meant first thing, first opportunity we have.”

“ _Can_ we?”

“I don't know. Let's try.”

We slept and woke; neither had slipped.  We looked into each other's eyes and laughed.

There followed several straight weeks—well, bent, but continuous. We sent a few spies back where they came from, collected some useful information for Cowley to keep a few unfriendly ministers in line, and found the lost granddaughter of an elderly peer and persuaded her to drop (and turn in) her new terrorist friends.  We had a handful of other cases, many of them drug-related.  Ray felt so safe that he went back to his sarky self, which was a relief, I must say.  I don't love him only when he's sweet-tempered.  In fact, when he's the cold, hard man with an arrogant sneer for the oiks we're chasing and a sharp green glance over his shoulder for me, it turns me on something chronic.

But the zig-zag life didn't stop because we were happy any more than it stopped when I felt I couldn't face another day of it. I woke in a flat I half-remembered, alone, with a bad feeling I tried hard to trace as I washed, dressed and ate, but I hadn't put the memory together by the time I drove to HQ.

Ray looked tenser than I'd become used to seeing him. His hair was fluffy but quite a bit shorter.  He quirked an eyebrow at me, but the special warmth I'd got used to in his gaze wasn't there. 

Cowley gave us an assignment to follow a yob, looked like a company man—we had blurry surveillance shots from a security camera to identify him. We were to observe and report, but not to shoot him (which warned me that I'd likely want to).  The information was that he’d been seen in Shepherd's Bush Green shopping centre, so we were off to look for him in the area.  We took my car, but when we first got into it, I didn't start the engine.

“What're y'waiting for?” Of course Ray was impatient.

Still, I wasn't going to put it off. “Got something I need to tell you.”

“About the case?”

I rubbed the back of my neck, squinting. It was a hell of a thing to need to do cold.  Don't know how Ray'd had the bottle to bring it up, really.  “Erm, no.”

“Then do it later.”

“Can't.” I cleared my throat.  “I'm, I'm here from next January.”

He shook his head, frowning. “What?”

“I'm like you. Skipping around in time.  Last night for me, was in January.  You told me in November that you do it too.”  I glanced over, but his face gave nothing away.

“When I was drunk,” he said flatly.

“No. We were—”  Christ, this was hard.  And he already knew he had time jumps, if not that we'd be a couple someday.  “We were in bed.  Together.”

He stared for what seemed like ages. “You're not taking the piss.”

“About this? Ray, have a heart!  I've never told a soul about it, never thought I would until you told me!”  I grabbed for his hand, and he pulled back at first but then let it stay in mine.  “We agreed to try letting each other know.  Because there's not enough time …”  I couldn't tell him how short his was, not now.  “... in the world for us.  To be with someone else who knows, who understands what it's like to be in 1981 one day and 1967 the next.”

His face had softened. His hand gripped mine.  “And 1973 the day after, maybe.  God, Bodie.  Really, you really know!”  He laughed, a short incredulous bark.  “We’re a team this way too.”  He wagged our joined hands up and down, and his face was vital again.  Something changed in his eyes.  “And this.”  He reached over, laid his fingers on my lips.  I kissed them while he watched me closely.

Frustrated, I said, “We've got to go to Shepherd's Bush.”

So we did, and split up when we got there. As hard as it had been to hear the circumstances of Ray's death, at least now it was a comfort to know it wasn't on the roof of a car park or in the environs of a shopping centre.

Unless telling him had changed something, lethally.

I forced my mind back to our weasley target, a grey little man with receding hair.   Ray saw him first, coming out of the parking structure, getting on the escalator.  He might just have been window shopping, but he seemed to be checking to see if he was being followed, so he might be there for the meet Cowley probably expected.  Ray went higher, to look down, and I came in at ground level.  Then the oik spotted me—don't know how, a man can go shopping, can't he?  Not like I had my gun out.  But naturally, once he started running, I did too.  Ray came down the quickest way and followed.  Out of the centre, down a street, across a car park, into a flat block.  “There he is!” I called out to Ray as the man vanished through the glass doors.  Two OAPs were coming out, cluttering up the door just as we got there, and they were not amused as we crowded past them.  With a gesture, Ray took the front stairs while I ran up the back ones to the second floor, and when the little grey man wasn't on the landing, I started down the main stairs.

I saw Ray near my end of the hall, facing a woman coming out of her flat door, telling her to go back. Then that bastard we’d been chasing popped out of another door like the Demon King with a gun.  I shouted, “Look out!” and shot the bugger.  He'd been _aiming at Ray_ , and I told Cowley so, but he was upset he couldn't interrogate the little weasel, whose name Cowley finally told us:  Conroy.  He offered us a lift back to the car, but I saw Ray look back up at the first floor, and knew he wanted to reassure the bird we'd scared.  “We'll walk back,” I told Cowley, who said we should join him at the mortuary and drove off.

Ray looked over at me, and I said, “I know. Let's make sure she's all right.”

There was a list of apartments and residents beside the back stair entrance I'd taken. Conroy's was there, and so was hers, when I looked.  Miss Ann Holly.

That was it: I knew when I saw her name.  She was the reason for the apprehension I'd felt when I woke.  It was the flat, because I'd moved out of it perhaps three weeks from today.  A short slip, this one, then, and one that would have been nothing but painful except, maybe, for what I'd told Ray this morning.  The last time I'd heard Ann Holly's name, it was as the woman he wanted to marry, the woman I'd had to vet, the daughter of a drug-smuggling gangster.  I never had been sure  that she really had no connection to the trade.  But even asking the questions needed to clear her had made her break it off with Ray, and he'd been right miserable for those weeks I'd been here for.

“Have you seen her before?” I asked, trying to sound casual, as we went up.

“Mm? No,” he answered.

“Or after?”

He grimaced. “No.” 

We arrived at her door and rang the bell. When she cracked it open and saw Ray, she tried to close it again, but he held it.  “Are you all right?” he asked.

She sighed. Then she saw me and recoiled a bit more, her eyes blaming me, disliking me. 

“It's our job,” Ray said, more defensively than I'd heard him before.

“What?” she asked. “You're hired to kill people?”

“Exactly right,” I said without any of the guilt she evidently expected. “We get paid for it.  Look, it was him or the golly here, y'know.  I know which I choose.”

She turned her shoulder to me but stared at Ray as if fascinated.

On cue, he said, “I just came to see if you were all right.”

Pale, her eyes wide, and her hand trembling on the door, she still lied, “Yes, I'm fine, thank you.”

So of course Ray said, “No, you're not,” and brushed past her. I followed.  He went on, “Have you got any drink?  Scotch?  Brandy?  Anything?”

“Do you make a habit of pushing people around?” she asked irritably, just as he would have, himself. I began to see what the connection between them had been.  While it amused me to see him get a taste of his own sarky medicine, it also terrified me.  Maybe he'd still love her.  Maybe we couldn't change these slices of time, just bumble through them.

“He's famed for it,” I told her while Ray was at her drinks cabinet getting out the liquor and a glass. I'd keep trying, anyway.  “It's good advice, though.”

He brought her the glass and said, “Drink it,” and then more quietly, “Drink it. All of it.”

She did, eyeing him speculatively.

I butted in again. “It'd be a good idea if you could lie down, call a friend—“

She rounded on me. “Who are you, anyway?  Both of you?”

“Doyle,” he said. “My name's Ray Doyle.”

“I'm Bodie,” I put in. “Just Bodie.”

She was still fighting. “And you kill people, do you?”  She looked from him to me, back to him.

“From time to time,” I said. “When necessary.”

Ray, still conciliating, said, “You've had a bad shock, you know. You could start crying, shaking, anything. You should really—” and she interrupted him.

“No, I'm perfectly in control, thank you. And I'm not the crying type.”

He looked at her approvingly, scaring me again. “No, maybe you're not.”

“Ray—” I began with no clear idea what I meant to say, just a strong, jealous desire to get him away before she began to flirt with him.

I was already too late. She cut her eyes over the top of the glass, which was still at her lips, and said, “And none of this for you, I assume, while you're on duty.”

I held my breath. He could have said no, we're always on duty but they trust us to hold our liquor.  He could have said, why yes, I need a drink myself.  He could have said, very kind of you, what do you think, Bodie? 

Instead he shifted his weight and looked uneasy, but said, “Uh, thanks but no, we need to get back to HQ. But I didn't get your name.  For my report.”  Hadn’t he seen it in the lobby, as I had?

“Ann Holly.” That was an attractive little Mona Lisa smile, I had to admit.

“Ann Holly,” he repeated, memorising it.

We left.

“You didn't get her number,” I said at the top of the stairs, hoping my voice was neutral.

He grabbed my shoulder and pulled back until I turned. He was still on the landing;  I was a step down;  he bent close, and I wondered if he'd kiss me, but he only tapped the end of my nose, saying, “Berk.”  Then he rolled his eyes, stepped past me and went on down.  “Working for it, aren't you?”

“Worth it, aren't you?” I said, hurrying to catch up.

He made me wait until we were nearly at the lobby door to say casually over his shoulder, “You've got me, mate.”

My mouth curled at the ends without my meaning to smile, exactly. We walked side by side down the same streets we’d chased, late summer leaves already falling and a brisk, gusting breeze tumbling them in the gutters.  Lovely day. 

“Are you always this jealous?” Ray asked with a sideways look.

I didn’t know what, or how much, to say.

“She’s pretty enough,” he said, “brave, smart, determined. Gave me the look.”  So he’d noticed, had he?  “Before this morning, I would have tried it on, asked her out, dunno what would’ve happened.  But she doesn’t _know_.  How deep can you go without telling something that important?  How do you tell?  Does that ever work?”

“Dunno, myself, never tried it. Except with you.” 

He kicked a clump of leaves as he walked. “I have.  Disaster.  I think the only reason she didn’t call the coppers or the men in white coats was that she was afraid of what a nutter like me would do to her.”  He laughed briefly, bitterly.  “Never saw _her_ again.”

I touched his elbow. “Nothing to worry about any more, that way.”

He stopped walking, so I did too. He grabbed and held my forearm, a public gesture.  “You are a needy beggar.”  Shaking my arm, he held my gaze.  “You know I can’t show you now.”

“Yeah, mortuary’s the next stop. See what they know about our man Conroy.”

It wasn’t much. Not a mark or a laundry ticket or a book of matches with a nightclub name on 'em.  The only thing Forensics found was a set of stains on his shoes—garlic butter and tomato sauce deep in the welts.  Ray told me to drive around the neighbourhood where he often met his grasses.

“You don’t get that sitting in the restaurant unless you’re eating with your toes or start a brawl,” Ray said as we went. “Maybe he liked to gamble. Or smoke. Italian kitchen is where it all happens, you know.”

“How do you smoke while you’re wading in spaghetti?” I asked.

He grinned, then said, “Hey. Pull over.”

A kid with curly dark hair, in a red and white athletic jacket, was walking with another bloke, also dark-haired but wearing a grey suit rather like my old one.

“Hey, Tony!” Ray called, moving his chin in an arc that said _come here_. Tony walked over; Mr Suit walked off in a hurry. “I'm looking for Benny,” Ray went on.

Tony shrugged, holding out the sides of his jacket as if to show he wasn’t hiding anything under it. “Yeah, well, Benny ain't here, is he?” he said, all Cockney and attitude.

Ray pressed him, and he eventually coughed up the name of a restaurant, the Napoli. Ray was sceptical, asked Tony why he was nervous—he was dancing with it—but the kid just ran.

“Tail him,” Ray said. “Benny had a run-in at the Napoli last year; he hasn't been there since.” We caught Tony in a call box—Ray grabbed the phone and got the name of a different Italian restaurant, Luigi’s.

We drove to Chalcombe Street and found the place closed, dark, with no one responding when Ray banged on the door. No good: “Ray,” I said and led him to the back entrance, also locked.

Then he called, “Bodie!” and dashed around a rail to find another dark-haired kid lying half-buried in rubbish, bottles and packing cases and garbage. “Benny!” he shouted, as if volume could wake him, but he was deeply unconscious and badly beaten up.

“I'll get an ambulance,” I said, and went to call one.

Much later, Ray came out of St Patrick's Hospital and got in the passenger seat. “Comatose. Ten percent chance.” He spoke on a sigh, staring out the windscreen.

All I could think of to say was, “They really hurt him, didn't they?”

“But why? A warning would have been enough for Benny, he was scared of his own shadow. Why did they have to go and beat him to pieces?”

I heard depression in his voice, and tried to remind him: “You did what you could. Come on to the pub, get some food and drink in you.”

“Nah, I just wanna go home.”

“And mope alone? It’s the job, Ray.”

“Yeah, what a job.”

We sat for a moment or two. I still wanted to persuade him; also, I didn’t want to be alone, myself, tonight.

“Known ‘im for years, haven’t I?” he burst out. “I caught him stealing apples from a barrow when I was a copper. He was just a kid, so, uh, I kicked his backside, read him the riot act, and sent him on his way. He’s helped me a lot since then.”

“I know,” I said.

“Never took money for any information he gave me. I called him my ‘undercover man.’ He loved it, he really loved that.” He laughed a little, breathily, and if we hadn’t been in the bloody car I’d have put my arms around him. “Poor dozy bastard. Simple, really.”

The pain in his voice made me think how much bigger his heart is than people give him credit for, even me. Made me ashamed that I’d been thinking of having my end away while he was grieving. I put the car in gear and drove.

“Where’re we going?”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to go home?”

“You’re hungry, though, right? Let’s get that meal.”

I couldn’t help but grin. “Mate, I need a ball of string to find my way round your twisty mind.” He quirked his mouth a little.

We ended up at his local, and he told me more about Benny. “Benito, his real name was. Named after some uncle back in the old country. Parents’re both dead. At least we don’t need to do that, inform them. But he was all alone, just hanging about with other kids like Tony, moving room to room.” He swallowed. “Hero worshipped me a bit, I think. Telling me things made ’im feel important.”

“Yeah,” I said, which didn’t really make much sense, but I wanted him to know I was listening. He was silent a while. I asked, “Want another half?”

“Nah,” he said. “Better eat. Takeaway or what?”

“Takeaway’s good. Chinese?”

“Yeah, fine.”

In the car, he said suddenly, “Dunno why I'm being like this about it. I mean, he wasn't my brother or anything.”

“You care,” I said, my voice gone all soft. “You always care.”

“Yeah, it's pretty stupid, in this job, innit? Don’t you always say?”

How could I deny it? How could I repeat it, as if his feelings didn’t matter? “And you always say nobody’s a nobody.” I ruffled his hair. “It’s who you are.”

In his flat, we put the takeaway on the table near the kitchen and passed the containers back and forth: Peking spare ribs, fried rice, chop suey, egg rolls. We ate quietly, since Ray seemed to have run out of things he wanted to say about Benny, and again my seductive talents seemed to have deserted me. Then the buzzer rang: Cowley. He came up and took a seat at the table, looking at the food and the teacups as if he hadn’t expected us to eat, or something. He told us Benny was dead. Ray looked at the fried rice carton in front of him and said nothing.

“I'm sorry, Doyle. I, I know you liked Benny,” Cowley said.

Ray nodded but didn’t look up.

But of course, Cowley hadn’t come just to sympathise. “He spoke before he died. ‘Dumbo.’ That mean anything?”

“Jumbo,” Ray corrected. “That meant something big. Benny liked using codes.”

That could be why they beat him, whoever they were. If he’d stumbled on something big to tell Ray.

Cowley went on, “And he said, uh, ‘the Christmas man.’”

“Christmas man?” Ray said. “No.”

“You sure?”

Ray said irritably, “Yeah, 'course I'm sure, Christmas man, no.”

So that was the first lead to Holly. I decided it wouldn’t be me who said that name aloud, though. Cowley said Betty would send a wreath, which was all very well if the poor little sod had anyone to bury him to begin with, and then he left. Ray leaned his head on one hand. I got up and put away the rest of the spare ribs and fried rice, then binned the empty cartons. Ray sat up as if he’d been napping and had just woken—he said, “You didn’t need to do that.”

I shrugged. “Too late. Done.” Moving a chair closer, I sat down again, put a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll go home if you want, or stay if you want. Got a lot on your mind, I know.”

“I want company.” He looked me in the eyes and put his hand on my knee. “Stay.”

I smiled.

“I’ll hate it if I jump times tonight and I never find out what’s going on.”

“Sometime you will.”

“Hard keeping track, though, innit?” He frowned. “I forget people, forget where I left them, or maybe I wasn’t even there yet when we met or had that conversation or did the things they remember. What if I jump tonight ’n end up in me childhood for years?”

“I’ll be disappointed.”

“No, you’ll just tell me again tomorrow, and we’ll be back where we are now.” He cupped my cheek. “I don't see how I wouldn't … I’d always choose you.”

 _Wise of you_ , I would have said, but he leaned in and kissed me, not passionately but with a kind of commitment beyond pleasure that I knew from November to January but at no other time in my life. It touched me so deeply that I didn’t even mind when he sat back and said, “Who’s the Christmas man, then, you think?”

“Santa,” I said. Ray grimaced. I shook my head. “Sleep on it, nose around tomorrow.”

“Sleep,” he said, half-questioning.

“I think so, don't you?”

And we did. Ray fit into my arms so perfectly, I almost didn't mind not having him. His sigh as we settled calmed my whole body. I wished I wasn't so tired because I always loved watching him sleep, long as I can remember, especially the way his lips press and loosen as if he's talking in his dream. But he wasn't dreaming yet when I fell asleep, and anyway the room was dark.

When light fell on my own eyelids and I opened them, he was watching me, with a kind of brooding desire that made me catch my breath. He'd pulled the duvet to one side, and I felt the chill of the sheet and the warmth of his gaze. “D'you know,” he said, “I could _see_ you getting morning wood,” and yes, I was hard, but his fingertip touching through the sheet made me much harder.

“Come here,” I said. Then, as my bladder gave me a pang, “No, wait.” I sat up and got out of bed to go to the bog. “Just a mo',” but I had to stare for a few seconds, because he put his hand on his own morning wood and my god, he was a centrefold. “Hold that thought,” I said hoarsely, and he chuckled as I ducked away, my mind still full of his shoulder and chest and fingers and cock and thighs, the way the top leg was a little forward and his head propped on the other hand, just a glimpse of those fingertips through his hair, the way his morning stubble made him look paradoxically younger and his lips redder and more moist—shaking myself off and washing my hands, I felt myself harder than ever. Walking back up the length of the bed, I stumbled because he was scratching through his chest hair meditatively and I wanted to crawl right over the mattress and eat him alive. Then I thought, _why not?_ So I did. Kissed the bone of his ankle, and he sucked in a breath, his leg twitching, but I kept going up his calf and thigh, his hair rough and then softer and curlier, then crisply curly where I nudged his cock aside, then softer again up to his navel. When I sucked and tongued it, he fell to his back, murmuring something I couldn't make out and putting one hand in my hair, then the other, not moving my head but rubbing lightly. I kissed once more and then nosed the base of his cock. The familiar smell was what I craved, the quivering strength and silk-velvet skin of his cock was what I had wanted yesterday, and the incredulous pleasure in his voice was setting me even more on fire.

“Is this, is this,” he said, “oh, Bodie … how— _god_!” and I swallowed, the cockhead just at the back of my tongue and his whole body jerking at every movement of my throat. I humped the duvet, the power he was giving me flooding through me in waves, moaned, though hardly any sound escaped, and he arched his back and came. So did I, letting go into the wrinkled bedclothes. As I held him, softening, in my mouth, gentling him with my tongue, he tugged weakly on my hair. I let go his cock, pushed up with my arms, dragged myself as he stroked my neck, grabbed at my shoulders, put his arms round me and took my whole weight, kissing breathlessly as soon as my lips were in reach.

“That ...” His voice was low. When he could find no more words, he shook his head, hugging tight, eyes closed.

I put my head on his shoulder. “I'm glad you're still here from yesterday,” I said. “Much more fun, this, than explaining all over again.”

He chuckled, then took a deeper breath and laughed harder. I'm besotted—love all the sounds he makes—but his real, full laugh is one of my favourites, so I just smiled and rode the movements of his chest.

Then he stroked my hair. I think, really, he enjoys feeling mine as much as I enjoy his, but he's never been very likely to touch my head when other people can see. He fingered my ear, too, lightly enough to tickle; I squirmed a little. “You let me do you next time,” he said. “Your turn.”

“It's all my turn.” I don't think he believed me, but our lovemaking was new to him. He didn't know how good it was for me to put my mouth on the man I loved, to give him pleasure, to see him take it. “And yours, with a right gorgeous bloke like me. Tall, dark, and beautiful. Born that way.”

He slapped at my head where he'd been petting it.

Eventually, even afterglow wears off. “S'pose we should be gettin' ready, startin' out,” he said.  

If someone had offered me whatever I'd like to do that day (that wasn’t sex), I might well have chosen a nice fast car chase, so I was in luck, as that's exactly what we got. Found the grass Ray wanted and the furs he'd stolen while Turner, ironically, was the one to find Tony. I knew Ray was angry at the kid, blaming him for sending Benny to be beaten up and for stalling Ray while Benny was lying in the rubbish, dying, but I was still surprised how he lost his temper with the stupid little bastard (he tried to take me on with film karate, for pity's sake) and bent him over the edge of the balcony. Ray's temper's like the weather, liable to turn at any time, but usually when he goes off it's because something else is bothering him. That day, he'd been bouncing, with that twinkle in his eye he always gets when he's had his end away, so I didn't expect an outburst. Worked, though, better than the fistfight, to get Benny's “Jumbo” tip about the big drug drop out of the lying little sod. But Tony didn't know about the Christmas man. I was beginning to think I'd have to fake something up to “find” the connection to Holly myself.

And then I realised: _Ray knew_. He knew that I moved around in time, so I could just tell him I'd been in shortly after the end of this investigation. So strange to be able to talk about it. I rehearsed in my head: _Ray, I know who the drug runner is, because I had to check out Ann_ _…_ _because you were going to marry her_ … oh, it was hopeless. If he knew he'd really loved her, that might send him right back to see her―he might feel obligated, at least to see that not having him didn't hurt or endanger her somehow. Why'd I have to be in love with someone with such a complicated conscience?

Why'd I feel the need, myself, to live up to it?

Well, really, the answer to that was simple enough.

From Tony's useless interrogation, we went to our office, where Ray wrote the report and I steeled myself. “Ray,” I said.

“Mm?” He pecked away at the aged typewriter he'd found somewhere and liberated. Each key was on a long stalk and took a second to reach the page, so a fast typist would tangle them like paper clips in a box. Ideal for us.

“I … I'm due to jump in a few days,” I said. “I've been next week already.”

“You've been next week already,” he said slowly, and it wasn't just the bizarre syntax. “What do you know?”

Even now, how could I ignore a straight line like that? “So many things, my son.” He rolled his eyes. “We were still working on this drug case, putting the file together for the Crown Court indictment. Against Charles Holly. Ann's father.”

“Ann's _father!_ ” He shook his head, but seemed less concerned than I had feared. “Poor girl. She can't have been involved.”

I shrugged. “Nothing in the file to claim otherwise.”

He put his hands on the typewriter again, then turned back to me, frowning. “You knew,” he said evenly. “When we were in her flat. When you staged your jealous fit. You knew it was her father we'd be taking to court.”

 _Jealous fit!_ I let that go. “I recognised her name, yes.”

“You didn't tell me then, next week. About the time jumps.”

“No. I never told anyone, not even you, until this time.”

His voice was very quiet. “How involved was I?”

It felt like a gun drawn on me, on the street, except that I didn't have my own in my hand. I took a hard breath and made myself speak. “You said you were in love with her. She broke it off because you, because while we―during the interrogation of her father, you asked about her and she overheard. She said you didn't trust her.”

He stared. I couldn't read the expression on his face. I didn't know what to do with my own face, so I just waited for him.

“Seems,” he said at last, “seems I can't trust anyone. Can I. Bodie.” He got up, looked away, held the back of his chair hard for a few moments, then walked right out of the room. He didn't slam the door.

Of all his tempers, the quiet, cold ones are the worst. This one scared me. I sat for a while, my thoughts going round and round. Then, for movement, for something to do, I got up from the sofa and wrote a note, “Call me.” I didn't sign it, left it beside the typewriter, and went to lunch.

He wasn't in the pub nearest HQ, no surprise there. I had a half and a cheese and pickle sarnie, both tasteless, and sat turning the empty glass in my hand, wishing for gin and lots of it.

No one was in our little office when I got back and put my head in the door. Ray wasn't in the rest room or the Records room either. The note, when I went back again to check it, was undisturbed. I left it lying but sat down and typed the rest of the report, slowly and messily because I hardly ever do it, gave it to Betty and left. The silver Capri we'd come in was gone. The gold one was still in the motor pool, though, so I took it. Once home, I threw myself on the sofa in the lounge. Silence echoed around me.

Ray didn't call.

In the end, I put on my jogging suit and had a run, because only sad birds sit by the phone waiting. I half hoped he would be at my flat when I got back there, but he wasn't. So I had an early night.

The next morning, I called in only to find that Ray had been in Records yesterday after all and was off chasing down a lead today. Well, two could do that. I went to see Miss Ann at the publishing house where I found she worked. She didn't much want to see me, but I waited her out in the reception area, and finally she gave me a few minutes. She sat behind her desk, manuscript pages all over it, and stared me down. I wanted to know if Ray had been to see her, but didn't want to expose myself by asking.

“Just checking round,” I said. “Background, everyone's connections, alibis, so forth. For instance, your mother and father are …?”

“Divorced, and my mother is dead,” she said coolly.

“Is your father still alive?”

“Uh ...” She fiddled with a pen, put it in a ceramic cup with the others. “Well, I, I think so. Yes, no one's told me otherwise.”

“Estranged?”

“Yes.” Her brows were drawn together.

“What does he do?”

“Um, development of some kind. Property, I should imagine.”

“Like your flat?”

She shrugged. “He did own it. It was in my mother's settlement, and I inherited it.”

“Did he own any others in the building?”

“I don't know. Look here, Mr Bodie, what is this all about?”

“As I said, routine.”

Her small red mouth drew itself smaller. “I don't believe you.”

“Why not? What other motive could I have?”

No answer. She gave nothing away, gave nothing to me. Her eyes were like stones.

“Do you have a photograph of your father?”

She gave it some thought, eyes falling to the paper in front of her. “I believe I do have an old one. If you like, we can meet at my flat when I've finished here, and I can show it to you.” She picked the pen back out of the mug. “For now, I must finish these notes before meeting with the author. I'm sorry, I have no more time this morning.”

Having been dismissed, I gave her my card and left.

Two calls, I was waiting for now.

Meanwhile, I went to the restaurant, Luigi's, where we'd found Benny. This time, they weren't closed and empty, but preparing for the luncheon rush, and there was a huge flash car outside, a white Cadillac.  Not the kind most people can afford from honest toil.  Round the back, I heard raised voices in the kitchen, so I loosened my gun in my holster, then eased through the door without opening it all the way.  Coats and aprons hung on pegs in the little back room, while light came in around the inner door, which was ajar.  I looked through the crack.

An enormous man—shoulders like a wall, hands like hams, and skin so black it made the gold on his hands and around his neck all the brighter by contrast—held a shorter, older white man against the edge of the workstation, bent back. Their faces were close.  The short man, evidently Luigi, was babbling in a heavy Italian accent, so I barely understood him until he cried, “Alessio, get it!  Get all of it! _Per l'amor di Dio!_ ” and a young bloke in an apron who looked like Tony nodded wildly and ran out.  The black man grinned, not nicely, and let Luigi stand up.

I didn't wait for Alessio. Jumping back into the Capri, I turned and came back neatly to slide along behind the Cadillac.  Our enforcer friend drove fast, right back to the same flat block where Miss Holly lived.  If Benny hadn't said the Christmas _man_ , I'd've had a good idea whom the driver was about to see.  Now, I wondered, but parked and followed him in.  He went to the first floor, carrying a paper bag, along to the door Conroy had jumped out of with his gun trained on Ray.  I hovered outside the hall door where I’d shot from and watched him tap on the door and go in when it opened.

They were right there, red-handed, and I wanted to go in and get them both. But I needed backup for that, and two pairs of handcuffs.

I needed Ray. Not just for this.  For every day and every night, and trusting me as well as loving me.  Damn. 

Back at the Capri, I checked the RT. There was a blinking light, and when I called in for the message, it was to come right back to HQ to get the information Ray had brought in.

While it wasn't the message I most wanted, I needed to find out what it was, so off I drove, wasting no time but running no lights.

Ray was in our office. The note was gone, and not in the bin as I glanced in it.  I sat in my usual spot on the couch, and he told me he'd looked up Mr Holly's own house and went to check him out.  The Vicar praised him and his contributions to the village fête, the publican said he bought rounds for the locals, and his butler said he was a fair employer.  “Practically a saint,” but Ray looked discontented.  I agreed, that was too much of a testimonial.

“What do you remember from the indictment file?” he asked me, so I tried to cast my mind back—or technically, forward.

“The plane delivery, remember what Tony said about the plane? We staked it out—Cowley was there himself, wrote his testimony—and it came into a little clearing on Holly’s grounds.”

“How’d we suss that originally?”

I shook my head. “Not in the file.  We need a trail to show Cowley, too:  he won’t order out all that backup without a reason better than ‘Bodie remembers that from the future.’”

He rubbed his face. “Not as useful as you’d think, is it?  Knowing the future?”  He touched his broken cheek.  “Think I could’ve changed this, yeah?  Since I knew it was coming?  But I didn’t.  Just got in the same fight, took the same beating.”

I’ve wondered how it happened, but he’d never told me and wasn’t telling me now. ‘Course, I still wasn’t telling him about any of the times I’d come back to him alive after I knew he’d died so young.  Except for the yearning pain, what had the memory of being without him ever done for me—or for him? 

“Look, Bodie,” he said awkwardly. “I lost me temper yesterday, you know how I do.  I hate feeling someone else is, well, knowing more than I do about me own business, telling me what I can choose.  I was too angry to think through what you knew and when.  In the car, when you told me we both moved around in time, neither of us had any idea who we were chasing or where we’d end up.”

“No,” I said. “I told you then because we promised—will promise—to tell each other as soon as we can.”

He nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.  Just don’t … protect me from making choices.”

“Hard to promise that,” I warned him. “I’m here to cover your back, and I don’t _want_ to see you tangled with the Holly bird again.”  He frowned, but then his face relaxed, so I went on, “Mine, aren’t you?  And lucky for you that you are.”  I smirked;  he rolled his eyes.  “It’s Charles Holly we need to trace, his connections.  I think he uses that flat where Conroy was as a place for his yobs to meet.  I’d love to know if he meets there himself.  While you were having a nice day in the country taking tea with the vicar, I was nosing around in the Smoke here, saw a heavy at Luigi’s who went right back to that flat.  Almost burst in on 'em, but wanted you to share the fun.”  I cleared my throat, looked under my lashes at him, hoping the next bit wouldn’t set off that short fuse of his again.  “And before that, I went to see Miss Ann at her day job, didn’t get much out of her, but she may have a photograph of her old da.  Said she’d call after work.”

He frowned, but in moments it changed from temper to thoughtfulness. “We’ll see, then.  Ta for telling me.  You’re trainable, then?”

“I’m already trained.” I held out one hand.  “Come see.”

“In the office? Just down the hall from Cowley?”  But he got up anyway and took my hand, holding it firmly as he came to me and bent to bring his mouth to mine.  His other hand settled on my cheek, and he licked across my lips so tenderly that my eyes fell shut at once and I left them closed when he pulled back and paused.  “You’re almost as beautiful as you claim,” he said teasingly, then kissed again, sweetly, lips and tongue, and after that on my eyelids and between my brows.  Then, standing, he kissed the hand he held.  His mouth was in a lovely curve, his eyes lovelier.  “Who’s training who?”

“Oh me, me.” I licked my lips, saw his eyes change.  “Aren’t you the gorgeous golly,” I said helplessly.  “You could have me right here on the couch, door open ‘n all.”

“Ruin your reputation, one of the office birds sees you.”

“I want you.”

“Oh, Bodie.” I saw the answering desire on his face. “I keep remembering this morning.  Even while I was still angry, I kept imagining you laid out on the bed.  Naked.”

I took off my jacket and holster. He looked panicked.  “Not now!”

“No,” I said, “ruin my reputation with Cowley, ‘n that’s worse than with the birds.” I lay back on the couch with my arms crossed behind my head, feeling how the polo stretched and pulled across my chest and on my upper arms.  “Just … thinking, y'know.”  I looked at him standing there, watching me.  

“Fuck,” he said softly, then turned away, his shoulders tense. Such beautiful shoulders.

A thought snapped together in my head. I sat up.  “Didn’t you say the vicar said Holly’d put on a flying display at the last fête?”

“Flying display.” He seemed bemused, sat down at the desk again, then shook his head and was back with me. “Yes, this year it’s to be a mini circus, but last year it was a flying display.”

“ _Planes_.”

“Planes last year.”

I waved that off. “Had access to planes then, maybe he still does.  Look, I’ve seen a few of those displays, haven’t you?”

“Once or twice.”

“They fly low. That’s the fun of it, how close they are over your head.  And radar—at low level, there's a limit, right. I mean, at the last minute, you could actually disappear off the screen.”

“Mm-hmm, I’ve heard that.”

“So if two planes are flying close, wings overlapping—” I overlapped my hands, pretending they were wings.

“They'd probably register on radar as one plane.”

“Then at the last minute, one of them peels off.” I separated my hands, palms down, one setting down on my leg while the other stayed in the air.  “The one carrying the drop goes right under the radar, lands secretly, the other one carries on and lands officially.”

“Brilliant.” Ray smiled.  “Bodie, you’re _brilliant_ , mate.”

“Now all we need is a map to show Cowley.”

We did that, but Cowley was still hesitant. “We need some evidence of his continuing interest in flight.  See if he owns a private plane, if he has a pilot’s license or employs someone who does.”

When we came out of his office and were halfway to Records, I caught Ray by the arm. “He employs three or four.  It was in the indictment, but I don’t remember their names, we’ll still need to find them.  But they’re there.”

We were still rooting around, Ray in the files and me on the phone, when we got a message that Miss Holly was on her way home and would meet me there. I looked askance at Ray.  “You coming along?”

He hesitated. “Bother you?”

“No,” I said, hoping it was the truth. It ought to have been.  I didn’t mistrust him, but I kept recalling how he’d grieved the relationship that hadn’t happened this time.

So we both went. Just before we left the car, he pulled me over and gave me a big smacking kiss.  “You remember that,” he said seriously.

It helped. Her eyes lit up when she saw him, and she talked more to him than to me;  he was pleasant with her, but didn’t engage any more than he usually would with a witness. 

She brought out the photo. It was an old black-and-white one, somewhat creased, seven or eight young men in uniform sitting in a double-line on a fighter plane.  One head was circled in pen.  “It's the only one I've got of my father, actually. Don't know how old he is there.  In his twenties, I think.  When he was still with the RAF.”

Ray turned it over to see the back, where names were written in more black pen. I craned my neck to see over his shoulder without getting as close as I normally would.  “Dusty Miller.  John Jones…” Ray pointed.  “Chas Holly.  Wally _Conroy_.”

“Yeah.” I looked at Miss Holly, who was looking at me with narrow eyes.  “RAF, where he did what?”

“He was a pilot.”

“We’re going to have to borrow this photo, Miss Holly. We’ll return it to you as soon as we can.”

The connection with Conroy pleased Cowley, and we set up the ambush—we'd need to be out there before dawn, perhaps for many days until the drop.

“We need sleep,” I said in the car, but Ray put his hand on my thigh.

“We'll sleep. Not right away,” he said.  We went to his and had the rest of the Chinese, and then he wanted to take me to bed for what he kept on saying was my turn.  “What do you like?  What do you want?”  His face was so serious.  We stood;  he put his hand on my arm.  “Want to fuck me?”

Something in his expression made me say, “It's no good if it's some kind of sacrifice, sunshine. Done it before, bottomed?”

He shrugged. “Who knows what's in time I haven't lived yet?  Never that I've been there.  Lots of years I haven’t lived.  Twenty, twenty-five years I have.”

He was younger than I’d thought, in experience. “Then not tonight.”

“I want you to have what you want.” But I saw relief in his eyes.

So I kissed him, slowly, with all my love and gratitude to him for this offer and for this night that I would not have had, if an older Ray hadn't been brave enough to tell me about his time-skipping. “When I fuck you,” I said tenderly, “I want hours.  I want to bring a picnic lunch and make a day of it, turn you into mush with pleasure.  I want you to beg for my cock and mean it.  I want you to have the best, which is me, with no hurrying and none of that fear I see—” kissing his eyelids— “in these beautiful eyes.”

He squirmed and his brows came down. “Don't treat me like one of your birds.”

I let go, held my hands up. “Want to rough me up?  Huh, hard man?  Do it.”  I was smiling, kept it up until he did too.  “I love you, Ray.  That's how I treat you, how I talk to you.  Every part of you, every minute with you.”  Suddenly my breath caught as memory flooded me.  “You don't know … when, when ...” Needing to hold him, I pulled him in close and buried my face in his neck.  His arms came around me and hugged tight.  One hand cupped the back of my head, keeping me still.

“I _don't_ know, do I?” he asked softly.  “You're ahead of me this time.  I'll be ahead another, another _time_ we're in, when I tell you about us.  Yes?”

“Yes.” Memory receded;  I relaxed.

“I want to make love to you.” Spoken in my ear, as if he were telling me a secret.

“Yes.”

So he made it my turn after all, laying me down on his bed and hanging over me, touching and kissing, watching me and giving me more whenever I sighed or moaned, moved or trembled. I supposed he had never given a blow-job either, but if so he was a fast learner, naturally talented.  I told him so, couldn't stop telling him.  What a wonderful lover he is.

We'd left the lights on in the lounge, so I could see his face , dimly, as he slept, and I watched long. After what seemed like only a few minutes of sleep for me, the alarm rang.  That black-and-white checked coat hides a lot of sartorial sins, and today's sin was yesterday's clothes.  Ray drove us to the ambush since he'd been to the estate.  I read the map to get us to the little valley clearing in the woods.  Ray went to talk to Cowley and I got into the back seat for a kip.  It was barely dawn when he woke me by opening the door I had my head against.  “Some nightclubs are still open at this time,” I complained.  But the plane came down and we got old man Holly red-handed, so it was worth it.  Took the rest of the day interrogating him and his minions.  Then Cowley gave us a day off before starting the indictment work.

So, likely, my next slip was tomorrow night. Ray was thinking about that too.  As I drove back, he said, “D'you have food in?  For that picnic lunch you wanted to pack?”

I glanced over and saw a hot bright smile that caught at my breath and made my cock jump. “Oh,” I said, slightly breathless and forcing my eyes back on the road, “No, I don't have much in.”

“It's Tesco's, then.”

“Boots, too.”

We bought all the fucking supplies—supplies for fucking, I mean—that we could possibly need. Ray kept teasing about oysters and such, inspecting cucumbers and bananas with a critical eye that made me burst into laughter, but in the end we made it to mine, up the stairs with the carrier bags, unpacked, and ate.  “Sleep tonight,” I said as firmly as I could.  “Fuck tomorrow.”

“Should go home then, right?” He looked as if he could decide either way.

“Christ, no,” I said without thinking. Then I thought, and went on, “Unless you want to.  You're not a prisoner!”

He grinned. “What, no handcuffs?” 

“Not even silk scarves.”

“Or rose petals.”

“Or poems to your eyes.” I paused, then said, “Tomorrow.  I can't promise no poems forever.”

“I'll cross that rhyme when we come to it.”

I groaned.

His colour rose; his eyes darkened.  “After last night, that sound turns me on like a gas burner.  Keep remembering how you looked, arching your back, all this pale chest," he reached out and brushed the fabric of my polo, “patched with sex rash, your mouth dropped open.  Fittest thing I ever saw.”

“And you, now,” was all I could get out.

His grin this time was sexier than I'd ever seen, even on him, or it was distorting my memory like a drug. “Still think we're going to kip?”

We didn't, much, restless and on heat like two teenagers, falling asleep in each other's arms, waking to make love and kipping some more. Before I knew it, before I'd planned, I was kissing down his spine to reach his arse, licking into the crack while he wriggled and protested, pausing only to say, “I want to.  Let me,” before I put my mouth pucker to his arse pucker and my tongue to pushing him past language.  He made plenty of noises, none of them words.  I bit his arse cheek to make him jump, and his hip and shoulder to make him shove back as I fingered him, kissing in his ear and stroking his cock.  Then I remembered the lubricant and made him shiver and climb higher with the cool slick of it. 

He didn't specifically beg for my cock, just said my name like a whole language, every tone of voice, “Bodie—bodiebodie, Bodie. Bodie!” until even I lost the sense of myself in it and heard only the surges of his desire.  And mine.

“Yeah,” I said and pushed, spread his cheeks and pushed again. “Oh, yeah.” 

When I first bumped his prostate, he leapt as if I'd electrocuted him, and his hands grasped air. I reached out and caught one, he squeezed it, and we rocked together.  “There we are, there you go, that's it,” I murmured senselessly, and he shivered all over and came in a spray that sent drops over an improbable amount of the bed.     

“Beauty,” I said, “Sunshine,” bit the back of his neck, and came myself.

We fell into sleep as if into a well, off a cliff, diving into water. The next time we woke, we were both shivering, and from cold, not lust.  The wreck of the bed made it hard to find covers and even harder to pull them over us, but we did, together.

There are special nights—or days—when love and lust twine together and I think I can live on the other person's body, never sated, drunk on their taste and smell and the feel of their skin, the look of them in every light. This wasn't the only sex-mad night I'd ever had, not even the only one with Ray.  But the way he threw himself into being fucked, this first time for him, ravished and driven into new surrender, was unique, tearing into my heart.  I couldn't stop touching him, as if my hands were holding him in one piece, or as if holding him kept me in one piece.

 _Can't lose this,_ I thought. _Can't lose him ever_.

I woke in the light, and was still in the same welter of messy bedclothes, while Ray was staring at me from about a foot away. “Were you here last night? Or some other time?” he asked.

“Here, now, and what a very good morning!” I put my arms around him and kissed him.  “All right?”  I stroked over his arse, cupped it.

Shifting a little, he answered, “I feel it. Not bad, but different.  Reminds me,” and he sounded … something that wasn’t any of the tones of voice I’d been hoping for.  Not happy.

“A pleasant memory, I hope,” I said cheerfully. It never works, but I always try to nudge him out of whatever hole he’s dug himself.

“Pleasant … ’s not the word. You know.  Turned me inside out, last night.  ‘Pleasant’ is a good cup of tea, a sunny morning.  This—being fucked up the arse—” clearly forcing himself to say it— “makes me, makes me a person I wasn’t before.”

“Not really,” I said in dismay. And, I’ll admit it, in irritation.  He’d loved being fucked.  I knew he had.  He always did.

“I love you, don’t doubt that.” He kissed my forehead.  “But I suppose … I liked the sex we’ve had, bringing you off.  But this.  I need to think about how it made me feel.  Whether, when, we do it again.”

“Sunshine …” I took a breath. “Ray, think, then.  As long as you don’t stop.”  I felt as if I was stripping off my skin, saying that.

“Not stop altogether,” he said, which was not comforting. “But today, let’s have a normal day off, shall we?”

So he did go home. I clenched my fists to not reach out, stepped down on the irrational panic pushing on my lungs, keeping my breath short.  I knew he needed to get food in, take his laundry out, do some cleaning.  We decided to meet for a run in the afternoon. 

That was not much of a success. I kept running too close, catching his heel under my trainer, bumping his elbow—not on purpose, so I couldn’t stop.  In the end, it bothered him so much that he stretched out an arm to create space between us and actually ran like that for a while.  We did get some exercise, and agreed to meet for darts later.

In a full pub, I couldn’t crowd him the way I had on the graveyard path where we’d run, but when we weren’t throwing, we got pressed together by the other pub customers. He leaned away.  I won the dart match.  I didn’t care, though I made myself take the piss a bit about it.  He said goodnight outside the pub.  It was hard to let him go, thinking I’d be some other time the next day, but I’ve done harder things.  There was no reason to think he wasn’t perfectly safe.

I lay in clean sheets trying to sleep for a long time. I’d put my copy of _The Book of Five Rings_ on the bedside table because I never had been able to read much of it, and if it was there next day, I’d  know when I was.

Waking, I turned to look and it was there. I stared.  This was a day I’d already lived.  But instead of rousting Ray out of bed and chivvying him to do more than just stare sadly at the wall, instead of hearing him tell me all over again about Ann’s intelligence and bravery and soft hair, I had a new day to … well, I didn’t know what.

But then, not knowing what would happen is what a new day _is_.

We’d changed something, and not something small. Couldn’t help but wonder what else we could change.

Not much, this morning, since we had to go into HQ and start the indictment work. A bit dull at the best of times, so repeating it was worse.  Ray was nervy.  I’d wondered whether a night alone would be better or worse to help him come to terms with his own seduction;  the answer seemed to be worse.

I’d never really thought about how many life-years we had. When the only time-jumper I knew was myself, it didn’t seem to matter except when the mismatch was too great (like the time I woke in a bird’s bed when I’d had only seven or eight years of living, and certainly no context for my own adult body or the bird’s).  But now I tried to measure my experience against Ray’s, and against the Ray I’d known in the last slip.  This Ray had said he was in his twenties, by experience.  My Ray of next November to January must be older.  I was near forty, I thought.  Neither of us had lived long in the years we were lovers.  Both had been greedy for more, as this younger Ray had seemed until yesterday morning.

Even time travel can’t hurry growing up, especially that sense of oneself at one’s core.

So I needed to woo him, but not by teasing and arousing. He needed to be the man he knew he was, not whatever less-than-man he thought he might be now.  I wasn’t competing with Ann, but with the hard-man CI5 agent, the cold face under the sunglasses, the one who ran and shot and threatened a lying grass.

“Seems like a long time since we hit the range,” I said casually, near the end of the day. “Want to shoot?”

“Why not?” he answered.

Why had I thought of darts? Beating me, beating his own record—that was what he needed.  “Brilliant, mate,” I said when he’d reduced the target to shreds.

He cast me a sideways look, then went over to my target, which was fine but not in tiny sad pieces like his. “Good thing I taught you everything you know about handguns,” he said.

“Lucky for me,” I agreed.

He looked sceptically at me again. “Don't coddle me, Bodie.”

Was the trouble that he's too damned intelligent or that he knows me too well? “Why not, sometimes, if I enjoy it?  Can't buy you flowers.”

It must have been how well he knew me even then, because it took him a few seconds to understand, and a few more for his mouth to stretch into a whole grin. “Can take me home.”

I ruffled his hair. “Little lost puppy?”

“Careful, I bite,” he said, the stroppy prat.

“I hope _so,_ ” I camped right back.

He raised his eyebrows. “Depends where, doesn't it?”

I opened my mouth to say, _You'll have to show me,_ but Macklin and a few of his victims came in, so we had to clear out of the way.

On the stairs, I slung a matey arm across his shoulders and said, “I will take you home, if you want. Care to fuck me?”

He stared.

“Or let me suck you,” I said, leaning in more, a hand on his stomach. “Have me on me knees, eh?”

Now he swallowed. “Yeah.”  His voice was rough and I felt how his breath had quickened.

There was no one on the stairs with us at the moment, but I knew I wouldn't be able to stop easily, so I didn't kiss him. Oh, I wanted to, though, and I stared at his mouth until he knew it too.

“You're mad,” he said, but he licked his lips before he broke away and went down the stairs at a half-run.

I followed, happier than I'd been all day, though not as happy as I was later, kneeling in front of him while he held up the wall and shook his head back and forth, his fingertips in my hair and his hips thrusting. A beautiful view as I watched his face, a beautiful bulk and warmth in my mouth, the taste of his skin and his semen better than food because it was his.

Then he made spaghetti for us, so I had food as well, and his cock up my arse for afters.

I'd been on my side, so afterwards we stayed spooned together, him on the outside as he stroked my chest and shoulder, kissed my neck. Maybe I should have waited, but on impulse I asked him, “How d'you feel now?  About yourself, about us?”

After a long pause, not moving his hand or putting his mouth back on my skin, he answered, “You don't think anything of this, do you?”

I turned over, tugged his arm until we were both sitting up, facing each other. “I think a lot of it,” I said, angry now.  “I think of you all the bloody time, and of having you dozens of times a day—of keeping you safe and doing the job together, as well.  I think highly of it, and usually, of you.  This is not at all, at _all_ , casual for me.”  I pushed on his arm as I let it go.  “You're not the man I thought you were if it's casual for you.”

“No—” he put that hand on my arm, now— “not casual, of course. Bodie!”  He leaned forward and kissed me, and again, and his mouth was as intoxicating as ever.  I put my arms around him as I told him in the best way I knew that I thought everything, everything of him and of us together.

“'M sorry,” he murmured, “I'm sorry,” but it wasn't remorse I wanted.

I looked in his eyes, willing him to understand, and he did. “I love you,” he said, and again as he held my head on his shoulder. 

“That's right,” I said without moving. “Think I'm taking the piss when I say you're mine?  I'm not.  But I'm yours as well. _That's_ who we are.”

When we lay down to sleep, I didn't, not at once. I kept thinking of Ray in November, worried that he'd hurt me by time-jumping.  I'd thought he meant only what he'd talked about, that if he jumped from an earlier time in his own experience, he wouldn't remember that we'd become lovers.  But now I wondered about how people who live forward change, as they grow from child to teen to prime to middle age, people who never meet their first teenage loves when they're old inside, or come into an adult relationship with a head in eleven-plus.  I wondered about the ends of other relationships I'd had, and even the way my mother seemed wary of me, as if she was never sure how I'd react.  I must have surprised if not hurt her, over and over.  We are hard to love, I suppose, Ray and I.  All the more reason we belong together, and all the more reason to be sure we tell each other.  At least we know what we're getting into.

Or now I knew.

In the new week that followed, work was the same: we finished the indictment file, worked a dull obbo, nothing but vague hints about an arms shipment, so we checked my contacts instead of Ray's.  That's always a bit tense, as if Ray puts my mercenary past out of his mind until we're actually talking to someone connected with it.  Worse this time, in fact, as if before, his grief over Ann distracted him from worry about how much I've changed since my gun-running days.   He had me on my knees often, that week, and I wondered if he thought I minded. 

I didn't.

I moved to my next flat, a snug little place with a view into a walled garden next door. Lots of roses, and an OAP who spent most of every day pottering with them.  Someone else's garden is the best of both worlds, to me:  I can't keep so much as grass alive.  Ray liked the view, too, and chatted with the gardener, brought out the wheelbarrow full of mulch, dug a bit for a new bed.  I sat inside with a cup of tea watching him break rosebushes out of containers, heave them around, and smile at the old fellow—Guerinot, his name was.  Ray came in all sweaty and happy, and I sucked him off in the lounge because he smelled so good.  He lay on the settee, smiling at the ceiling, his trousers pulled down and his prick lying left, and I wanted to say all the soft things in my heart, but didn't want to disturb his afterglow.  Gardening, I could talk about, the roses.

“You'll need your own garden when ...” my heart failed me, but I forced myself on: “you're out of this rat race.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, “a cottage somewhere remote, like, oh, Cornwall, right?” He sat up.  “Cornish palms and buttercups.  Not seeing a soul from day's end to day's end, maybe a dog, yeah, I can see that.”  He canted an eyebrow at me, the city boy.

“Or Cheapside,” I said. _With me_ , I didn't say.

“Right.” He looked as if he'd heard both.

It was the day before I was to change times, unless some new mixed-up thing happened because of the changes we'd made. I hadn't told Ray that I thought it would be tonight.  So I was surprised that evening when I could see his nerves ramp up, as if he were the one leaving.  We were at his for dinner, which he'd cooked.  Some stir-fried thing with more vegetables than I'd normally eat, but it was good, and I told him so.  He fiddled with his silverware.

“Stay tonight,” he said softly.

“Of course I will.”

“It's been a few days,” which it had, since we'd spent a night together. “I bought the gel.  I, I've been practising.”

My breath caught.

“Look at you,” he said, hushed. “I didn't know you wanted it so much.”

I shook my head. How could I explain?  It was the thinking he'd done, the practise, and now the way he was looking at me.  “You're sure?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” And his face was as confident as on the firing range. 

He took the lead, brought me to the bedroom and showed me how he slicked himself, kissed me and pumped my cock until it was hard. “It's so big.  I notice when it's in my mouth, too,” and he licked his lips.  I jumped in his hand, and he smiled down and then into my eyes.  “Oh, come on, come here.”

I held him, stroking, kissing, until all the nerves were gone and he writhed in the bed. His arse in my hands quivered;  his balls drew up under my fingers and tongue;  his eyes were closed and his mouth a little open, and as my fingers found the wet, pulsing iris of his arse, he whined and pushed down.

“When I'm like this for you, when you look at me,” and my voice was almost too low for even me to hear, “all laid open and panting for it,” he swallowed, and I took his adam's apple in my mouth, sucked it, and let it go to say, “I look like you do now.” I pulled his hips and pushed my cock into him, and he took it.

I'd wanted him to keep the lead, maybe sit on me or lie on his side, but I couldn't lose this sight, his face while his hands reached and grabbed at air, his feet flat on the mattress and pushing up, his hips thrusting as I bent to kiss his sweat from his chest, the hollow of his throat. His cock thrumming against my skin.  I leaned to one side to free a hand, and when I stroked him, he moaned, opening his eyes and searing me with the expression in them:  acceptance, passion, and love, love above all.  “Give it to me,” I whispered, and he did.  Then my own orgasm was his, taken by his convulsions and his cries.

We lay, still locked together even as my prick shrank and left him, his arm around my head and mine around his waist. “You're _mine_ ,” he said fiercely.  “Mine.”

“I am,” I said, and slept.

I woke in his arms, but not in the same bed. His hand was shaking my shoulder while the other arm cradled me.  “C'mon, Bodie,” he said.  “Wake up, working day, got villains to catch an' reports to write.”  He frowned.  “And coroner's court.”

“Oi, 'm new here,” I said.

“Oh, are you?” He smiled down at me and kissed the end of my nose.  “Surprised?”

“No,” and I hugged him tighter, kissed his mouth. “Pleased.”

“When were you?”

“Just after the Holly case,” and I looked through my lashes. What did these changes do to us later in our experience?

“Right after you ravished me the second time.” He recognized it immediately.

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said briskly, “love to revisit old times, but we've got to get moving. Later, yes?”

“Absolutely.” I fondled his rear and he gave me a stern look, pulling out of our embrace and the bed.

He showered while I got into what must be yesterday's crumpled clothes. We'd have to stop at mine so I could shower and change.  Ray's was a lovely large flat with crown mouldings and Morris-style wallpaper, watercolours and prints everywhere I looked, white dressers and cupboards, pale jade green on the painted walls.  “Matched your eyes, did they?” I asked him when he came out of the bathroom drying his hair.

“CI5 just got it, furnished,” he said. That towel around his waist looked ready to fall off any minute.  “Has a second bedroom.  I wonder … well, maybe.”

“That an invitation? Yes.  But will Cowley agree?”

“Dunno till we ask.”

I watched as he dressed, loving his fitness and his ease. He wasn't showing off, though he looked at me often enough;  this morning was normal.  He put on a white t-shirt, eased himself into jeans, threaded a belt through the loops.  Socks and shoes.  “Floor show all right?” he asked as he stood up, reached for wallet and keys.  His suit coat was wheat-coloured, setting off his skin a treat.

“I'll watch you any time,” I admitted. “Better than telly.”

“I was thinking, actually—”

“No, thinking? Careful, mate, might sprain something.”

“Shut it. I was thinking that having our own bedrooms in the flat might really” —he shot me a glance that seemed almost apprehensive, almost guilty— “give us our own space, when we want it.”

A spot in my chest burned cold. “When you want it.”

He was motionless for a moment, then made a gesture with both hands, like a shrug. “All right, you know I'm a prickly bastard.”

“You hold me when I sleep,” I said blankly.

He stepped closer, put a hand on my arm. “And I love that.  But sometimes I just need … time alone.”

Wasn't it just like him, I thought, to start a conversation like this when we had to get the day rolling?

“Well, we'd still have to ask Cowley,” I said.

“'Course.” He started telling me how little food he had in, and I started taking the piss about that.  Both of us were relieved to drop the other topic, I think.

We stepped into the lounge on our way to the front door, and I stopped dead, staring. “It's the rug,” I said. “The white shag rug.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The one I'll die on.”  I couldn't recognize the tone of his voice, but then it wasn't an ordinary kind of thing to say.

“What're you talking about _bedrooms_ for?  In this flat?”

He looked resigned, which made me want to hit him. “I knew you wouldn't want me to be alone here.  Wouldn't want to _leave_ me alone here.”

“Oh, I see,” I said coldly. No more words were coming to me, though he was watching.  Just “Let's go.”

I checked, at home, to see what food I had in: enough to pull together a couple of bacon sarnies for breakfast, so Ray did that while I showered and dressed—in a rust-colour shirt, black trousers, tan jacket.  For once, I didn't care whether it was a good look on me—in fact, the brown cords would have been better.

We spent the morning at HQ, writing the reports, or rather Ray wrote them and I typed them, since he remembered what was in them and I didn't. I typed badly, of course, but it was a relief not to have to pretend to remember the chase and the students blowing themselves up, and the pacifist terrorist writer we questioned.

“Don't know what these university students are coming to,” I said. “Thought they learned the meaning of words like 'pacifist.'  Doesn't include blowing up innocent tourists in my dictionary.”  Typing as I spoke, I reached the end and whipped the paper off the roller.  “And there you are.”  I presented it to Ray.

He tapped my watch as he took the paper, so I looked at it. “10:50.”

“The coroner's court’s not until one o’clock,” he said. “Let's backtrack the van a bit, see if we can figure when the explosives went into it.”

We called a few car parks and went out to see if the journalist was there to be asked, but he wasn't. No joy.  Then we hit a pub for lunch and went back to HQ to meet Cowley and go off to court.  Normally, Ray or I would have driven, and Cowley would have been in the same car.  But this afternoon, Lin Foh was coming to see the inquest with Murphy as his bodyguard.  Depending what came out in the evidence, Cowley wasn’t sure whether he wanted another guard or someone to look into any new names, so he had four CI5 cars parked around the St Pancras Coroner’s Court building.

The benches were hard, the backs too straight and the seats too narrow. The edge caught me the length of my hand above my knee.  Ray put his elbow up, but really the back was too high to be comfortable, so by the time the coroner summed up he'd taken it down and put it back up twice, and as the old prune began to speak, he pulled it down again.  There wasn't enough information, was the trouble.  We didn't even know the name of one of the young men in the van.  Didn't know what they'd planned to do with the explosives.  Didn't know whether they were part of a network, or just some disgruntled kids who'd gotten in over their heads.  Death by Misadventure.

Seemed simple enough to me. “You play around with bombs, you get blown up.”

“Cynic,” Ray said.

I shot back, “Pragmatist.”

Ray joked back, “I must look that up,” and sounded normal enough.

So I said, “Yeah, after you've had a drink, mate.”

“No, I'm away.”

 _No_ , I wanted to say. Not away without backup, back to that flat.  “C'mon, one on the corner.”

“I've got some chores to do.” So casual, as if it were any other time in our lives.  “I'll take advantage of the spare time.”

“ _Ray_ ,” I said, but he just kept that casual mask on, and I realised this was one of the times he'd meant when he talked about wanting to be alone.

It was still a working day, right? I reminded him, “But the job's blown up in our faces.”

He smiled the way he does when something hurts him with its unfairness. “Those two kids blew themselves up rather than knock the porter over.  I'll see you.”

I watched him walk away. I knew his Capri was in the street bordering the park.  So I walked off in the direction of my own car, hurrying once I was out of sight, and drove to his flat at speed, but not the straightest way.  I parked near enough to observe and far enough off to be unobtrusive and slipped on my holster ... got the lockpicks as well. For all the talk about sharing, I didn't have keys to Ray's flat. If Ray saw me, he'd come over and give me what for, almost as good as letting me guard him. 

He parked, half a block away, and an ugly van repainted yellow came after and parked across the street, with a good view of the flat entry. Ray walked to the stoop looking intent, but didn't see either of us followers.  No one got out of the yellow horror, which confirmed my guess that it had trailed him.  Might just be an unusually aggressive bird, or a double-glazing salesman for all that, but I didn't believe so.  Every nerve I had was on end.

Almost as soon as Ray had gone in, the yellow driver's door swung open and a slim bird got out; she had black, straight hair cut on an angle, and the way her coat swung, something heavy was in the pocket.  Like a gun.  She went in, and I left the car and ran round to the fire escape.

I went in the floor above Ray's flat and saw she was there before me, perched like a pale vulture where she could see the lift. She was right to watch it:  I heard it start up and was as sure as she was that it had Ray in it.  I heard the gates clank apart, the front door open and shut, and there went the bird down the stairs with me after.   My gun was in my hand.

She tried the knob, but of course it was locked. Next she pulled a set of lock-picks out of the heavy pocket and worked over the keyhole until even I heard the click.  She was in, and since Ray wasn't there, I gave her time to select her best ambush and relax as much as she could.  Then I came in, not keeping quiet, as if I were Ray coming home with groceries.  I checked each reasonable hiding place as I passed it, but if he were to be shot on the lounge rug, the lounge was where she must be going. 

And there she was. She looked Chinese, but I've never been very good at telling the difference—was Lin Foh from Malaysia or Viet Nam or Indonesia or where?—and all I could really see was how her eyes squinted and her brows wrinkled together.  And the gun in her hands.

Ah, but she was an amateur and I've been trained by our Brian. I aimed at her while she was still nerving herself, and said evenly, “Put it down, or I'll blow you right out over the balcony railing.”

She actually turned to look. By that time, of course, I had the gun from her and her hands behind her.  She struggled, but those thin arms never had a chance.  “You don't settle down, I'll have to knock you out, and I'm too much the gentleman to enjoy that,” I told her.

Unfortunately, I didn't have my cuffs and didn't know where Ray's were. I ended up dragging her into the kitchen and rooting through drawers until I found the twine.  Then I tied her to a kitchen chair and sat in the other one to wait for Ray.  The stereo was still playing, Mozart, I think.

A magazine or a newspaper would have been pleasant, but there were none in the room. Cookbooks have never been what I liked to read.  I could have been interrogating her, but her lips were clamped shut and I decided I wanted to know if Ray could recognize her.  To be frank, I was also a bit afraid of getting carried away.  My gun was loaded, and she had intended to kill Ray.  I can carry a grudge, and I’d carried one for her for years, without even knowing who she was.

At last we heard the flat door again, the lock clicking open and the hinges whining, not quite a squeak. Ray walked into the kitchen with a carrier bag and two bottles of milk clasped to his chest.  “How’d you get in here?” he asked.

“Picked your lock ‘n saved your life, petal. This lady was planning to kill you.  Do you ever actually use those second locks?  They're said to improve security.”

He edged the milk bottles onto the counter and then hoisted the carrier bag up beside them. By the time he turned back to me, his face was already defensive.  “I was only going grocery shopping, not even taking the car.”

“Nothing bad can happen if you're only grocery shopping,” I said as if agreeing.

He had the grace to look a little shamefaced. “We'll need to call this in,” he said.

“Yes, go right ahead.”

Cowley shouted a bit, I could tell by the look on his face if not by the buzzing noises coming from the phone. The coppers arrived in pretty good time.  Ray didn’t know her name.  Nobody asked me anything, so I suppose I must have looked fairly grim.  At last the flat fell silent and we were alone.  Ray was coiling the twine and looking at his own hands.

I let him stew.

Pulling out the drawer with a jerk, he almost had it out altogether and had to catch it with his other hand, nearly missing it since the twine was in his palm. I reached out too, but wasn't really close enough.

“I can do it,” he said in his stroppy voice.

“You're right, you know,” I told him.

Surprised, he met my eyes, but he looked wary too. He knew what was coming.

“You _are_ a prickly bastard.”  I stood up.  “And an obsessive git.”  I stepped toward him.  “With a guilt complex.  You think those blokes blowing themselves sky-high was our fault?”  He stepped back and leaned against the counter.  “You think you're responsible for the invention of gunpowder?  The creation of white shag rugs?”  Close now, I could see the small hairs between his brows and the faint dark stubble he gets in the afternoon.  “D’you think you deserve to die here, die when she shoots you?”

“I've done it,” he said. “I've lain on that rug unable to breathe with me chest and back on fire.  I've known I was dying, Bodie.  I thought this morning, those boys died yesterday, maybe this is my day.”

I couldn't bear hearing it. Grabbing his upper arms, I spoke fiercely into his face.  “You'll just have to die again.”  I shook him a little.  “It's not happening today.  You are not leaving me today.”

He heaved a great sigh and looked me straight in the eyes to promise, “I’m not leaving you today, or tomorrow, or any day I can help,” and I caught him to me and kissed him hard and long.

All the days after that were new. I _looked forward_ to slipping ahead, because I wanted to go where that gravestone had been, on a day it had stood there, and see nothing but grass.

And that would have been a good ending—I was satisfied. I was overjoyed!  But I still slipped, one night, woke into a dim half-light, nearly dawn, and heard a familiar freight train clattering outside.  That noise meant I was in my old bedroom in Liverpool, lying beside my brother John Edward Charles, who I realised had wet the bed again.  Rolling away from the spot, I stretched and felt the bedrail with my toes, so I must be fourteen, the year I'd had my growth spurt.  Maybe this was the time I ran away for good.  I leaned over the side of the bed, held up the trailing edge of sheet, and peered under.  In the gloom, I could make out my bulging gym bag.  Already packed.

I thought, _What if I go to Derby instead of to the docks? Ray’s seventeen, in body years.  What’ll happen if I find him?_ I decided to find out.

It’s never too early to have a happy ending, in my view. And the longer we’re together, the better, our true minds married, laughing at the tempests of our zigzag lives.  I might have to believe there’s some kind of purpose to it, now.

When I reach Ray, I’ll ask him what he thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> What Bodie calls "living zigzag" in this story comes from "If This Is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" by F M Busby, first published in 1974.


End file.
